


She Will Lay Belief On You

by Not So (Silberias)



Series: The Lady from Another Grinning Soul [2]
Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Lucrezia and Micheletto are totes bros and you know it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 08:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1422190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silberias/pseuds/Not%20So
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucrezia grows bored sooner than later with her dear Alfonso, and she wants to hand her son to Cesare without that man of Naples hovering over her shoulder. So she absolves Cesare of his sin of abandonment and steals away in the night.</p><p>Alternate universe, where Lucrezia doesn't bother herself with loyalty to Alfonso for nearly so long. And babies. That.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Will Lay Belief On You

It took only weeks after Lucrezia’s wedding to Alfonso de Aragona to realize she yet again carried a child within her—and that it again was not her husband’s. Still, she waited the requisite months to confirm the pregnancy before announcing it to her jubilant boy-husband. If Cesare had not been in France, finding some French noblewoman to give him the power he needed to protect the family, she might have written to him inviting him to Naples. She might have told him he would sooner have a true Borgia son from her than any child of a Frenchwoman. Instead she remembered that he’d been ashamed of the pleasure they’d found together, and she was glad of the fact that she’d been forced to consummate her marriage to Alfonso so soon after that sinful—delightful—night. Things might have proven…awkward other wise.

It would be hard for those around her to remember the semantics of a mere week, and so she would not have to plead a premature birth to avoid suspicion. The Neapolitans kept her well-watched here but even they could not know that eight days before Alfonso put his seed in her in Rome, she had exulted in the feeling of Cesare moving inside her.

She remembered, as she fanned herself during dizzy spells and resisted the upsets of her stomach, her dear brother’s hands on her back, her flank, her breasts. His scratchy kisses sliding down her neck all the way to her flower. Most of all, Lucrezia remembered the look on his face when he joined their bodies. It was the expression the pilgrims wore when confronted with the miracles of the saints in Rome—all the answered hope and joy radiating from their eyes, the childlike wonder that opened their mouths and just barely slacked their jaws, and most of all the intense focus as though knowing never again would they see such evidence of the beauty of God than this very moment.

All her life she had been told by her family that she deserved love. She deserved adoration. She deserved to be the focus of any room absent of her father’s current mistress but even in the presence of someone like La Bella she must be the second looked upon at the least. She was the hope that their family might one day be as beautiful and pure as herself.

When she’d first met her husband, who recently had been working up the courage to take her to bed once more right before she told him of the child growing in her, she’d thought him the man her family had told her she deserved. He had looked on her with hallowed wonder that rivalled the hot, too long glance she’d always received from her brothers. But he hadn’t become her adoring acolyte—he’d been wounded by the barbs that came attached to the Borgia rose, and she hated him for it and wanted rid of him. Where her brother, her dear brother Cesare who had gasped her name as he spilled his seed into her, had fought for her baby to come to Naples her Neapolitan husband had quietly judged her from afar with his silence on the matter.

Taking the path of silence was choosing a side, and by the time Cesare returned to Italy—he’d married a disgraced French princess two months pregnant with a servant’s bastard, for which the monarchy was so grateful they gifted him an army—Lucrezia was well tired of Alfonso’s sighs and touches. He believed his rose to have been clipped of thorns by his family and liked her better for it as her belly swelled with what he believed his child. This reminded her, as Micheletto swung up behind her on the horse they were stealing, that he would never love her Giovanni for the perfect fact that the child had her blood. Not as Mama loved the toddler, nor as Papa doted on his grandson, nor even as Cesare who looked down on the babe with the eyes of a father.

She would let Cesare’s French army or Micheletto’s cheese cutter deal with Alfonso de Aragona as they would, glad only now for the boy-husband’s presence to give legitimacy to Cesare’s baby. As Micheletto urged the horse out of the city, the blood of her guards drying on his hands, she smiled a little in the darkness. If her brother looked upon her as a saint, she would do the saintly thing and forgive him his sin of abandonment—he loved his family almost as furiously as he loved her, and had any other man but Father ordered him to France he would have disobeyed.

“Micheletto, if my husband comes to Rome will you take him boating?” She whispered as they cantered steadily north towards Cesare, and Father, and home. The thick beard of her brother’s manservant-assassin scratched at her neck in a way more pleasant than Alfonso’s had, but less familiarly than Cesare’s rough, short beard.

“Should the Prince of Salerno come sniveling for your return to the stench of Naples, I shall take him boating before he even reaches the Vatican. But, my lady, I was under the impression that your _husband_ makes his way to Rome via Milan.”

“Sweet assassin, how you indulge my fantasies. Would that you and Cesare might make this world safe for a family such as mine.”

“You are Lucrezia Borgia, the lady of my master and the mother of that poor babe left in Rome. I shall do more than indulge you, I shall obey you.”

She let the silence then hang, the clop of the horse’s hooves on the ground serving as a meter to her dance with Cesare’s master of death. He was warm behind her, but unlike so many men he did not shift behind her to feel her flesh more fully. Cesare could take care of himself these days, and he’d given Micheletto direction to look after her instead.

“And should my aims prove crosswise to those of your dear master? What then?”

The arm banded around her waist to keep her still—to allow her to sleep if she wished, she knew—tightened for a fraction of a second.

“You are two halves of one soul that has sealed together at last, my lady. There is no way either of you might tear my loyalty in two.”

Lucrezia snuggled her head up under the assassin’s chin, then, sighing out and relaxing her body so she might doze a little. He would not let her fall from their mount, nor would he himself fall victim to sleep. He was as steadfast as the stars, the backdrop of the waxing and waning of the moon.

The waxing and waning of Cesare and herself.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Lucrezia knows the baby is Cesare's because she knows she should have bled in the week between her wedding and her consummation. The second time around she is wiser to what is happening.
> 
> Also she and Micheletto are best buds, and you all know it. 
> 
> Title again from Lady Grinning Soul.


End file.
